


Where You Belong Is By My Side

by GingerAle3



Series: AroAceing the Line [3]
Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: AroAceing the Line 2021, Canonical Temporary Character Death, Demiromantic Oscar Wilde, Developing Relationship, M/M, Oscar Wilde Is Fine (Rusty Quill Gaming)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 11:01:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,475
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29682975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GingerAle3/pseuds/GingerAle3
Summary: Meeting Zolf Smith for the first time hadn’t registered as anything particularly important. Another short-tempered ass who took one look at Wilde and decided he already knew everything he needed to know about him, too caught up in his own head to consider that other people have complex lives and thoughts and feelings of their own.Of course that would prove to be utterly untrue in time, but he felt he could be forgiven for making snap judgements considering that the other was very clearly doing the same.
Relationships: Zolf Smith & Oscar Wilde, Zolf Smith/Oscar Wilde, could be read as platonic but intended as romantic
Series: AroAceing the Line [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2177172
Comments: 6
Kudos: 45
Collections: AroAceing the Line





	Where You Belong Is By My Side

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the AroAceing the Line event on tumblr.  
> (@aroaceingtheline)
> 
> 24/2 - Wednesday  
> Relationship
> 
> These two...THESE TWO...rusty quill gaming stop making me cry challenge.
> 
> (Title from Standing By by Pentatonix)

Meeting Zolf Smith for the first time hadn’t registered as anything particularly important. Another short-tempered ass who took one look at Wilde and decided he already knew everything he needed to know about him, too caught up in his own head to consider that other people have complex lives and thoughts and feelings of their own. Of course that would prove to be utterly untrue in time, but he felt he could be forgiven for making snap judgements considering that the other was very clearly doing the same.

Ultimately, he didn’t particularly care for Zolf or about Zolf. A few threats that he didn’t feel particularly threatened by, a demand that he had no intention of fully honouring, and a vague feeling of brewing exasperation that they might be stuck working together in the future. To tell the truth his mind had been much more focused on the fantastic booze he’d swiped from Hamid and on his upcoming night with Bertie. He was just thankful that his taste in men notably improved after that point.

\- - -

Sure enough, he was told that he would be the handler for the London Rangers We’re Still Working On The Name, and it took all his professionalism to not roll his eyes when he saw Zolf Smith’s name scratched into the top of the paperwork. Wonderful, they’d be working together directly then. He was certain that it would go badly, his only real point of curiosity was how long it would take.

As it turned out, it didn’t take long at all. The faint pleasure of being proved right, even to himself, glowed in his chest as Mr. Smith threatened to drown him in a bucket again. It wasn’t quite enough to counteract the annoyance of having water repeatedly created over his head, but it at least took the edge off somewhat.

\- - -

Leaving Paris was a fascinating comedy of errors. One minute he was walking down the street desperately trying to get Hamid to let go of his hero complex and get out of the city before a dragon levelled half of it. The next, there was someone flipping over his head, a sharp pain in his mouth, and then nothing but darkness.

When he woke up, it was to complete confusion. Sasha was yelling something about La Gourmand’s men being outside, he could hear roaring in the distance, Zolf was glowing slightly, there was a burnt corpse on the floor, and Wilde’s head hurt really quite badly. His illusion took longer than he would have liked to put together, and for want of any immediate inspiration he had to base it quite heavily on Bertie’s armour, but thankfully it was enough of a distraction to stop them from all being killed.

Embarrassingly, he couldn’t even manage a simple charm effect when he and Zolf were spotted leaving, and for the first time in quite a while he was genuinely apologetic. There was hardly time to dwell on it though, and at least his illusion at the aeroport hadn’t fallen quite so flat. By that point, his clothes were soaked through, he was exhausted and completely out of spells, and all he really wanted to do was catch his breath for a moment, so of course the only crewed airship there was full of separatists. As Earheart turned on him with a look like murder on her face, he found himself trying to work out if he’d committed some sort of sacrelige recently, because the gods certainly seemed to have it out for him.

While he appreciated Zolf asking if Earheart could find some way to look past his meritocratic connections, he could already tell that there was no way he was staying on that airship. He had no intention of arguing, getting his people out of Paris mattered much more than getting himself out. There was always another handler who could step in and do his job, but it was much harder to bring together a group of people with their level of skill, knowledge and willingness to get directly involved in horribly dangerous situations. That didn’t make walking back out into the rain much easier though.

He didn’t turn back as he walked away, even as he heard the airship taking off, or the sounds of its engines getting fainter and fainter until nothing but the rain remained. Oscar Wilde had no time for sentiment or loneliness, all that mattered was getting out of the city.

He wouldn’t deny that he missed having Zolf there to stab people when his spells failed him though.

\- - -

The next time he met with the newly renamed London and Other London Outstanding Mercenary Group (L.O.L.O.M.G. really was much easier to write out), Zolf wasn’t with them and Hamid’s name had replaced his on all the paperwork.

Wilde didn’t ask about the absence, though he was a bit disappointed that his verbal sparring partner had mysteriously vanished. And if he’d been hoping that Zolf could help him with the curse that was just starting to take hold at the time, well, no-one needed to know that. Wilde was fine, he just wished people would stop asking.

\- - -

The months leading up to meeting Zolf again were long, hard and painful. In spite of his best efforts to distance himself, he’d become fond of L.O.L.O.M.G., come to trust them and even consider some of them friends. Their disappearance into one of the most dangerous places in the world had hit him harder than he had expected.

When his and Zolf’s separate investigations seemed to overlap somewhat and the Harlequins put them in contact, he had expected to be met with hostility, if not outright aggression, but the months had changed Zolf a lot. His hair and beard were shockingly white, and the watery legs Wilde had briefly seen in Paris were gone, replaced by mechanical things that reminded him uncomfortably of the simulacra. What changed most was his outlook. The dark, raging thing behind his eyes seemed to have calmed like the sea after a storm, and while he would still grumble and complain at Wilde, it felt like it was more out of habit and obligation than real anger. They were far from friendly with each other, but both acknowledged the other’s importance to their shared work, and once they reached that understanding they were both stunned to find that they worked remarkably well together. Once Barnes and Carter joined their ranks, their team only got stronger. Sometimes it was enough to make him forget that he was chasing a pipe dream just to stop himself from collapsing into despair.

That’s not to say that things were ever easy. Watching the villages surrounding their own being conquered one-by-one left them all desperate to help even as they knew their secrecy couldn’t be compromised, and, well...the less said about the events that left him with a scar the better. It just meant that in between the bad times, there were also times when Zolf would bring a meal to his desk and force him to stop for long enough to eat, or when he’d join the others for a game of cards and catch Zolf’s eye with a smirk as the other two started arguing again, or when he’d pass by Zolf’s room as the other was quietly humming a sea shanty and would stop for just a moment to listen. Some days, those moments were all that kept him going.

\- - -

Hamid and Azu were alive, and Wilde very badly needed to sit down in his office and process that fact. All throughout their quarantine, that thought had been growing in the corner of his mind, bigger and louder and more resistant to his efforts to shove it down into the neat little box he kept reserved for quarantine periods. Now though, there could be no doubt, and that thought had broken out of the box and run rampant through his mind. They were alive, they were here, not dead or gone or covered in blue veins-

It was a lot to take in.

Zolf found him sitting at his desk, not even trying to pretend to do work, just staring at an unremarkable point on the far wall as he tried to deal with the expected wave of thoughts and the somewhat unexpected wave of emotions washing over him. His words were quiet, but he was using his mother-hen voice, the same one he used when Wilde had forgotten to eat all day or fallen asleep at his desk the night before. He knew he wasn’t the one being fussed over on this occasion, it was clear in the way that Zolf’s eyes kept darting to the door and the new energy in his movements. Wilde hadn’t seen him so excited in...well, ever, when he thought about it. It was nice to see, though he did wish that Zolf would realise that he had every intention of being friendly. Whether Hamid or Azu would be was another question, but they could cross that bridge when it came to it.

\- - -

The second quarantine period was honestly a trainwreck even before the kobolds appeared. Between the fact that they couldn’t all fit in the cell and just had to spread out to the entire basement and the fact that they were clearly all getting steaming drunk (why they thought that Wilde couldn’t hear them was beyond him), it wasn’t exactly a conventional isolation. Then a group of kobolds appeared in the middle of the night, caught him off guard, tied him up and locked him in a closet, because his life had just been too normal before that apparently.

The fact that they saw Hamid as some sort of leader was at least amusing enough to make up for his mortally wounded pride, but those days spent with the whole inn in quarantine put him more on edge than ever. The fact that any day anyone of their number could start showing blue veins, and that if that happened the whole cell would be wiped out, it plagued his mind and stopped him from getting much rest. At one point he’d even considered asking Hamid to magically put him to sleep, but, well. Anti-magic cuffs had their drawbacks.

Zolf locked himself in his room early on in that time, and didn’t come out until the end of the seven day period. Even then, he only reappeared because Azu had gone up to find him. Wilde didn’t miss him during that time. Not at all. And even if he did, that was no-one’s business but his own.

\- - -

Hiroshima was incredibly busy compared to what Wilde had become used to, and that was fine. Maybe it reminded him of his days before everything went wrong, living the socialite’s life in London and navigating a balance between his career as a writer and his career as a meritocratic agent. Maybe it put him on edge because he had no clue which of these people could have properly quarantined, who could be infected, who could compromise his entire operation and everyone he cared about simply by standing too close.

But Wilde was fine.

When they had started to settle into the city, they met up at a noodle bar not far from the aeroport. Sitting around, eating good food with friends, things felt somewhat normal for the first time since they left the inn. Towards the end, Zolf grumbled something about tying knots, and how was Wilde meant to pass up an opening like that? His smirk didn’t feel the same as it used to, still felt crooked and wonky, but it seemed to still have the same effect if the glare and flush on Zolf’s face were anything to go by.

“Time and a place, Wilde. Time and a place.”

\- - -

Wilde thought that he adapted remarkably well to not being on solid ground. The first week or two was rough, the constant drilling from Earheart as she tried to mold their ragtag group into an able-bodied enough crew to brave the Northern Wastes left him exhausted. He didn’t even have enough energy at the end of his shifts to do work, not enough strength left in him to so much as lift a pen, and for all that it was a novel experience it was one that he was not eager to repeat. Afterwards though, when they started getting something that could almost be considered downtime, he warmed up to life on the ship quickly.

The air was crisp and clear, a welcome change to the constant hot humidity he’d been dealing with for over a year in Japan, and the views were frankly breathtaking. Not that he’d ever admit it, but one of the other things that the ship had going for it was the chance to finally see Zolf in his element. Certainly there were differences between an airship and a sea vessel, but there were more than enough similarities for the dwarf to quickly fall into a routine that seemed to fit him like a glove. Wilde had never seen him as confident and at ease as he seemed standing at the ship’s wheel, and there was a certain joy to it. He may not have seen Zolf at his worst, but he’d certainly never seen him at his best before, and First Mate Zolf Smith seemed to bring out all of his best qualities without any of his crippling self-doubt.

He taught Wilde how to fly the ship in case of an emergency, and Wilde wasn’t sure what was more distracting: the terrifying thoughts of all the things that could happen for Zolf to need him to take over, or the comforting warmth of Zolf’s presence, hands guiding his own as he tried not to soak up the contact too obviously.

Wilde was quite disappointed to find out that nearly everyone had swapped bodies except for himself, but he supposed that it was yet another price to pay for the anti-magic cuffs. He was glad Zolf didn’t change though. It would be awkward to want to hold his hand when his hand was being piloted by someone else.

\- - -

The ship was going down and for all that he was new to piloting, Wilde was reasonably sure it shouldn’t have been going down as quickly as it was. The screeching of metal and splintering of wood as it started to reach the ground certainly seemed to support that opinion. The deck lurched violently beneath his feet, his grip on the railing ripped away as boards buckled and the ship slammed to a violent halt, and before he could even think to react, he was in the air.

In the moment of confusion, he didn’t even have time to brace for the inevitable impact before the air was punched out of his lungs, and the world vanished before his eyes.

\- - -

Oscar didn’t know where he was. It looked like some sort of city, hovering miles above the ground, but no-one was around.

That was nice. It had been so long since he had taken a moment to himself. He looked out across the forest, breathed the fresh air, and thought of absolutely nothing.

\- - -

Zolf was there. Oscar was quite sure he hadn’t been a minute ago, but here he was.

That was nice too. He’d wanted to take some time off with Zolf for a long time as well. They both worked too hard at...something. They deserved a break.

Now if only Zolf would stop talking about going back, and not being able to stay, or not being willing to stay. Oscar just wanted to take some time, just five minutes without someone else demanding more from him, was that really so much to ask?

He felt so tired, and felt a phantom tugging at one side of his face, instinctively reaching up to touch a scar that wasn’t there.

Zolf was giving him a choice though. He wasn’t demanding more than he wanted to give, if he wanted to Wilde could stay here and sit and sleep and rest-

But not with Zolf.

The decision was difficult. Oscar knew what he wanted, but if Zolf was going to keep acting like there was nothing between them, like they were just colleagues or working together out of necessity, he knew he wouldn’t get it. At the end of the day, Oscar Wilde did not want people to want his help, he wanted someone to want him.

He decided to give Zolf one last chance to actually say what he needed to hear, before he just gave up entirely.

“Just give me a reason, other than because there’s something that needs doing. That’s all I need, just one reason, other than “There’s another job for you, Wilde”. That’s all I’ll need.”

“Do you want there to be another reason?”

“What did I just say? Obviously I do, yes.”

“Fine. Because I need you Wilde.”

\- - -

While it may have been a hell of a steep price to pay, dying and coming back to life did seem to have its advantages. For one, he didn’t seem to feel the cold any more. Certainly useful for the climate they were in. The complete lack of scars took him longer than he would have thought to notice, but it was nice to be able to look in the mirror without being reminded of the stupidest mistake he ever made. Granted, it now reminded him of the ship crash and of vague memories drawing him in with the temptation of sleep and rest as he looked at his now shock-white hair, but that hardly mattered. He’d already become quite skilled at avoiding his reflection.

By far his personal favourite change was Zolf though. It was like the man had decided that he’d left too many things unsaid before Wilde...took a temporary journey elsewhere, so had decided to prevent that happening again by saying exactly whatever popped into his head. At first that had involved him haltingly recounting what had happened, their rest together, the reason why Wilde had agreed to come back, but over the next few days it became more noticeable.

Zolf would bring him tea made exactly how he liked it, and when he thanked him he’d awkwardly mention the fact that he worked hard to get it right consistently because it was the one nice thing Wilde always let him do, followed by a grumpy comment about how he should take better care of himself. One evening as Wilde was brushing his hair, Zolf quietly offered to braid it for him, and Wilde didn’t even hesitate as he couldn’t name a single other person he would willingly trust with his hair. At the breakfast table, he leaned over and subtly pointed out to Zolf that Azu and Kiko were leaving together, and the dwarf’s expression melted like butter, his voice gentle as he said it was sweet and that he hoped it worked out for them.

When Zolf casually dropped into conversation that Azu had mentioned that there was a park nearby, Wilde started wondering aloud about the logistics of it. How in the world do you set up a park on the back of a giant bear anyway?

“We could, uh...go find out? If you want to, that is.” Zolf wasn’t looking at him, his voice uncertain and nervous. Wilde blinked at him, stunned into silence for once.

“Why, Mr. Smith, are you asking me on a date?” Zolf turned an impressive shade of red and one hand moved up to rake through his short hair.

“God, I don’t know Wilde. I don’t know what’s going on here, or what’s going on between us. I just- I know I care about you. A lot. I know I want to spend time with you. I know that whenever I think about the future you’re always there and I know that right now, taking a walk in the park with you sounds really nice. That...alright?” Something nervous in Wilde’s chest unravelled. True, this might be easier if either of them had a clue where it was going, but there was something oddly reassuring about the fact that Zolf was as uncertain about the nature of their relationship as he was. Getting to his feet, he moved to stand next to Zolf, casually brushing their hands together but making no move to take Zolf’s in his own.

“That sounds wonderful. Shall we?” Zolf still looked nervous, but there was relief there now, a smile on his face as he finally met Wilde’s gaze. Slowly, clearly giving him time to move away if he wanted to, Zolf reached out and took his hand.

“Yeah. Let’s go.” And with that, they turned to face whatever came next. Together.


End file.
